Signal Engineer

About the Role

Matilda is Australia's large language model (LLM), whose performance depends heavily on the quality of its training data. The Signal Engineer plays a crucial part in determining the quality ceiling of the model by creating and maintaining pipelines that convert massive, raw, and messy datasets into well-prepared training material. This position blends engineering expertise with editorial decision-making applied through programming.

Key Responsibilities

• Develop and maintain scalable data pipelines that ingest, cleanse, deduplicate, filter, and score training datasets ranging from terabytes to petabytes.
• Create quality assessment tools, classifiers, and heuristics to isolate valuable data from irrelevant information.
• Design dataset mixtures and conduct experiments to evaluate their impact on model improvement.
• Build tools for exploring, sampling, and auditing the contents of the data corpus.
• Collaborate closely with research and training engineering teams to ensure data selection aligns with desired model behaviors.

Candidate Requirements

• Proven engineering skills with experience in Python, data tooling, distributed processing, and creating reliable pipelines.
• Exceptional attention to detail given the compounding effect of minor errors at large data scales.
• Strong judgment and discernment regarding what constitutes high-quality training data.
• Experience handling extremely large and unstructured datasets.
• A keen curiosity about the influence of data on model functionality.
• High capacity for rapid learning; advanced degrees or prior LLM experience are not mandatory.

Preferred Qualifications

• Practical exposure to working with web-scale datasets or pretraining data workflows.
• Experience processing unstructured text data.
• Familiarity with distributed data processing frameworks such as Spark or Ray.
• Knowledge of data deduplication, quality classification, and tokenization techniques.

Additional Information

This is a full-time position based physically in Melbourne, Australia, collaborating closely with our onsite team. Visa sponsorship is not available; applicants must have valid and unrestricted work authorization for Australia.